November 24, 1859 British naturalist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which explained his theory of evolution.The basis for the theory is natural selection, the process by which organisms change over time as a result of changes in heritable (genetically based) physical or behavioral traits. Such changes allow an organism to better adapt to its environment and help it survive and have more offspring. Evolution is now universally accepted among scientists, and is the organizing principle upon which modern biological and related sciences are based.
Darwin and “On the Origin of Species”
November 24, 1869 Women and men from 21 states met in Cleveland to organize the American Women Suffrage Association, led by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Julia Ward Howe. The group’s approach to enfranchisement for women was through acquiring the right to vote state-by-state. Those in Cleveland had broken with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of the National Women Suffrage Association over the 15th amendment to the Constitution, which had granted the vote to black male Americans following the end of slavery, but had not enfranchised women, whether white or black. Anthony and Stanton protested the protection of black rights over universal suffrage. Original document from AWSA in the National Archives
November 24, 1947 A group of writers, producers and directors that became known as the “Hollywood 10” were cited for contempt of Congress when they refused to cooperate at hearings about alleged Communist influence in the movie industry. The Hollywood 10 Following their appearance in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) under Representative John Parnell Thomas (R-New Jersey), the House of Representatives voted 346-17 for the citations. All were convicted and sentenced to 6-12 months in prison. The charges were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.Invoking their 5th Amendment right not to be witnesses against themselves, and their 1st Amendment right to freely associate with whom they choose, the Hollywood 10 refused to answer the question, “Are you a member of the Communist Party or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Others cooperated: the mother of actor and dancer Ginger Rogers testified her daughter had been asked to say in a film, “Share and share alike, that’s democracy,” a line from a script written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. Rogers said this was “definitely Communist propaganda.” Free The Hollywood 10 demo Readmore (2 links)
November 24, 1970 14 American students met with Vietnamese in Hanoi to plan the “Peoples’ Peace Treaty” between the peoples of the United States, South Vietnam and North Vietnam. It begins, “Be it known that the American people and the Vietnamese people are not enemies. The war is carried out in the names of the people of the United States and South Vietnam, but without our consent. It destroys the land and people of Vietnam. It drains America of its resources, its youth, and its honor.” The treaty was ultimately endorsed by millions. Read the treaty
November 24, 1983 On Thanksgiving Day seven Plowshares activists hammered and poured blood on B-52 bombers converted to carry cruise missiles at Griffiss Air Force Base near Syracuse, New York. Bloody handprint on missile. Watch Plowshares history video Readmore(2 links)
November 24, 1987 The United States and the Soviet Union agreed to scrap short- and medium-range missiles in the first superpower treaty to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF treaty), signed by Reagan and Gorbachev, was the first to actually reduce the number of nuclear weapons held by the two sides.
On Friday, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo locked in a $6.6 billion deal with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for it to invest $65 billion in three state-of-the-art fabrication plants in Arizona. This will bring thousands of jobs to the state. The money comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, about which Trump told podcaster Joe Rogan on October 25: “That CHIPS deal is so bad.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he would work to repeal the law, although he backed off that statement when Republicans noted the jobs the law has brought to their states.
Also on Friday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a Biden administration rule that would have made 4 million workers eligible for overtime pay. The rule raised the salary level below which an employer has to pay overtime from $35,568 to $43,888 this year and up to $58,656 in 2025. The decision by Texas judge Sean D. Jordan kills the measure nationally.
On Sunday, speaking from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, President Joe Biden said that it would not be possible to reverse America’s “clean energy revolution,” which has now provided jobs across the country, primarily in Republican-dominated states. Biden noted that the U.S. would spend $11 billion on financing international responses to climate change in 2024, an increase of six times from when he began his term.
But President-elect Trump has called climate change a hoax and has vowed to claw back money from the Inflation Reduction Act appropriated to mitigate it, and to turn the U.S. back to fossil fuels. What Trump will have a harder time disrupting, according to Nicolás Rivero of the Washington Post, is the new efficiency standards the Biden administration put in place for appliances. He can, though, refuse to advance those standards.
Meanwhile Trump and his team are announcing a complete reworking of the American government. They claim a mandate, although as final vote tallies are coming in, it turns out that Trump did not win 50% of the vote, and CNN statistician Harry Enten notes that his margin comes in at 44th out of the 51 elections that have been held since 1824. He also had very short coattails—four Democrats won in states Trump carried—and the Republicans have the smallest House majority since there have been 50 states, despite the help their numbers have had from the extreme gerrymandering in states like North Carolina.
More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him. (Emphases mine- A.)
Although Trump ran on lowering the cost of consumer goods, Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk, along with pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have vowed to slash the U.S. government, apparently taking their cue from Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei, who was the first foreign leader to visit Trump after the election. Milei’s “shock therapy” to his country threw the nation into a deep recession, just as Musk says his plans will create “hardship” for Americans before enabling the country to rebuild with security.
Ramaswamy today posted on social media, “A reasonable formula to fix the U.S. government: Milei-style cuts, on steroids.” He has suggested that cuts are easier than people think. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted that on a podcast in September, Ramaswamy said as an example: “If your Social Security number ends in an odd number, you’re out. If it ends in an even number, you’re in. There’s a 50 percent cut right there. Of those who remain, if your Social Security number starts in an even number, you’re in, and if it starts with an odd number, you’re out. Boom. That’s a 75 percent reduction done.”
But, as Bump notes, this reveals Ramaswamy’s lack of understanding of how the government actually works. Social Security numbers aren’t random; the first digit refers to where the number was obtained. So this seemingly random system would target certain areas of the country.
Today, both Jacob Bogage, Jeff Stein, and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post and Robert Tait of The Guardian reported that Trump’s economic advisors are talking with Republicans in Congress about cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) formerly known as food stamps, and other welfare programs, in order to cover the enormous costs of extending tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Medicaid is the nation’s health insurance for low-income Americans and long-term care. It covers more than 90 million Americans, one in five of us. Rural populations, which tend to vote Republican, use supplemental nutrition programs more than urban dwellers do.
The Washington Post reporters note that Republicans deny that they are trying to reduce benefits for the poor. They are, they say, trying to reduce wasteful and unnecessary spending. “We know there’s tremendous waste,” said House Budget Committee chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX). “What we don’t seem to have in the hour of action, like when we have the trifecta and unified Republican leadership, is the political courage to do it for the love of country. [Trump] does.”
Those cuts will likely not sit well with the Republicans whose constituents think Trump promised there would be no cuts to the programs on which they depend.
Trump’s planned nominations of unqualified extremists have also run into trouble. Senate Republicans are so far refusing to abandon their constitutional powers in order to act as a rubber stamp to enable Trump’s worst instincts. Former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a Trump bomb thrower, was unqualified to be the nation’s attorney general in any case, but as more information comes out about his alleged participation in drug fueled orgies, including the news that a woman allegedly told the House Ethics Committee that she saw him engage in sex with a minor, those problems have gotten worse.
Legal analyst Marcy Wheeler notes that the lawyers representing the witnesses for the committee are pushing for the release of the ethics committee’s report at least in part out of concern that if he becomes attorney general, Gaetz will retaliate against them.
According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, fear of the MAGA Republican colleagues who are already trying to bully them into becoming Trump loyalists is infecting congress members, too. When asked if Gaetz was qualified for the attorney general post, Representative Mike Simpson (R-ID) answered: “Are you sh*tting me, that you just asked that question? No. But hell, you’ll print that and now I’m going to be investigated.”
The many fringe medical ideas of Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., earned him the right-wing New York Post editorial board’s denigration as “nuts on a lot of fronts.” The board called his views “a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines.” Kennedy is a well-known opponent of vaccines—he called Covid-19 vaccines a “crime against humanity”—and has called for the National Institutes of Health to “take a break” of about eight years from studying infectious diseases, insisting that they should focus on chronic diseases instead.
Writing in the New York Times yesterday, Peter Baker noted that Trump “has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation’s capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it.” Mischievous glee is one way to put it; another is that he is trying to destroy the foundations of the American government.
Baker notes that none of Trump’s selections would have been anything but laughable in the pre-Trump era when, for example, Democratic cabinet nominations were sunk for a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny, or for a donor-provided car. Nor would a president-elect in the past have presumed to tap three of his own defense lawyers for top positions in the Department of Justice, effectively guaranteeing that he will be protected from scrutiny.
A former deputy White House press secretary during Trump’s first term, Sarah Matthews, said Trump is “drunk on power right now because he feels like he was given a mandate by winning the popular vote.”
Today Trump confirmed that he intends to bypass normal legal constraints on his actions by declaring a national emergency on his first day in office in order to launch his mass deportation of undocumented migrants. While the Congressional Budget Office estimates this mass deportation will cost at least $88 billion a year, another cost that is rarely mentioned is that according to Bloomberg, undocumented immigrants currently pay about $100 billion a year in taxes. Losing that income, too, will likely have to be made up with cuts from elsewhere.
Finally, today, CNBC’s economic analyst Carl Quintanilla noted today that average gasoline prices are expected to fall below $3.00 a gallon before the Thanksgiving holiday.
November 18, 1910 Hundreds of suffragists marched on the House of Commons in London, England, with reinforcements arriving to replace the “fallen” and arrested. Protesting government inaction on the Conciliation Bill, which would have enfranchised about a million women, they were brutally forced back by London police, leading to a public outcry. Read more
November 18, 1964 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover publicly characterized Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. as “the most notorious liar in the country.” King replied that Hoover “has apparently faltered under the awesome burden, complexities, and responsibilities of his office.” The FBI vs. Martin Luther King Democracy Now
November 18, 1970 President Richard Nixon asked Congress for supplemental appropriations for the Cambodian government of Premier Lon Nol. Nixon requested $155 million in new funds for Cambodia — $85 million of which would be for military assistance, mainly in the form of ammunition.
November 18, 1989 More than 50,000 people took to the streets of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, demanding political reform. In the biggest demonstration in the country’s post-war history, protesters held up banners and chanted: “We want democracy now.” Read more
November 18, 1993 South Africa’s ruling National Party, and leaders of 20 other parties representing both blacks and whites, approved a new national constitution that provided fundamental rights to blacks and other non-whites, ending the apartheid system. South Africa held its first democratic multi-racial election on April 26, 1994.From the preamble: “WHEREAS there is a need to create a new order in which all South Africans will be entitled to a common South African citizenship in a sovereign and democratic constitutional state in which there is equality between men and women and people of all races so that all citizens shall be able to enjoy and exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms….” South African citizens in line to vote. Constitutional history of South Africa (2 separate pages)
November 18, 2001 In London, 100,000 marched against the U.S. and British attacks against Afghanistan.
November 16, 1928 An obscenity trial began for Radclyffe Hall’s novel, “The Well of Loneliness.” Great Britain banned it for its treatment of lesbianism, though it contained no explicit sexual references. A U.S. court in 1929 ruled similarly, for its sympathetic portrait of homosexuality, and because it “pleads for tolerance on the part of society.” Radclyffe Hall Read more
November 16, 1989 Six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were brutally murdered by U.S.-trained and -supported death squads in El Salvador.In 1995 the United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador linked the slayings to 19 members of the armed forces who were graduates of the School of the Americas (SOA, now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), a facility run by the U.S. Army at Fort Benning, Georgia. Over its 59 years, the SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. The graduates have consistently used their skills to wage a war against their own people. Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor. The Truth Commission’s report More on the School of the Americas
November 16, 1990 President George H. W. Bush issued Executive Order 12735 which found the spread of chemical and biological weapons (CBW) to constitute an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” He declared a state of national emergency to deal with this threat. The order reiterated U.S. policy to lead and seek multilaterally coordinated efforts to control the spread of CW and BW and directed the secretaries of State and Commerce to adopt a variety of export controls.
November 16, 1994 After receiving assurances from the United States, Britain, and France, the Ukrainian Parliament approved Ukraine’s agreement to follow the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear-weapons state.
November 17, 1973 President Nixon told an Associated Press managing editors meeting at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, that “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.” Read more
November 17, 1980 Hundreds were arrested at the Women’s Pentagon Action protest of patriarchy and its war-making. Read more
November 17, 1989 Riot police in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, arrested hundreds of people demanding the resignation of the leader of the Communist-led government. More than 15,000 people, mostly students, took part in the demonstration demanding democratic rights. [see November 18, 1989 below]
November 17, 2000 The Florida Supreme Court froze the tallying of the state’s presidential election returns, forbidding Secretary of State Katherine Harris to certify results of the vote count in the presidential race between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.
Mehdi Hasan then joins, first touching on the already-advancing relationship between the Trump and Netanyahu administrations as Israel prepares an annexation of Northern Gaza, before shifting back to the still-developing numbers from Tuesday’s blowout win by Trump and the GOP, looking at Trump’s wins among minority voters (particularly Latin men), and unpacking why his vision was able to appeal to groups he actively seeks to discriminate against. After expanding on the major role misogyny and racism played in grounding Trump’s campaign against Harris, Hasan and Emma parse through the divide between blaming the campaign and blaming the voters, discussing the complete gap in perception and reality around border crossings, crime, and inflation and the failure of messaging behind, before wrapping up the interview with what Democrats have to change about the way they do politics. Emma also touches on a note on fighting fascism from a French Leftist.
November 15, 1917 About 20 women peacefully picketing for universal suffrage (right to vote), who had been arrested in front of the White House a few days earlier, were subjected to beatings and torture at Occoquan workhouse in Virginia. The National Women’s Party and other organizations had been picketing the White House and President WoodrowWilson as he traveled around the country eversince the inauguration of his second term.
Mary Winsor The incident became known as the “night of terror.” Wilson had led the country into the European war (later called World War I), by characterizing the U.S. mission as “making the world safe for democracy.” The women demonstrating outside in Lafayette Square called attention to the need for complete democracy at home, where half of its citizens lacked complete voting rights.Many women, including Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, had been arrested several times, usually for obstructing the sidewalk, and imprisoned before. When a judge learned of the abuse he freed the women. Public outrage over their treatment increased sympathy for the suffrage movement. left: Lucy Burns in Occoquan Workhouse, Washington, DC. right: Alice Paul, New Jersey, National Chairman, Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage; Member, Ex-Officio, National Executive Committee, Woman’s Party, ca 1915.
November 15, 1940 75,000 men were called to Armed Forces duty under the first peacetime conscription. Draft inductees leaving Wilmington, Delaware in November, 1941
November 15, 1943 Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler’s head of the SS (Schutzstaffel or protective rank), Gestapo, the Waffen SS and the Death’s Head units that ran the concentration camps, made public an order that Gypsies (more properly the Roma) and those of mixed Roma blood were to be put on “the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps.” Gypsy prisoners arriving at a Concentration Camp
Himmler was determined to prosecute Nazi racial policies, which dictated the elimination from Germany and German-controlled territories of all races deemed “inferior,” as well as “asocial” types, such as hardcore criminals. Gypsies fell into both categories according to the thinking of Nazi ideologues and had been executed in droves both in Poland and the Soviet Union. The order of November 15 was merely a more comprehensive program, as it included the deportation to the Auschwitz death camp of Gypsies already in labor camps. The Gypsies in Germany Gypsies: Forgotten Victims of the Holocaust
November 15, 1957 U.S. Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) was founded. Thirty years later on November 20, SANE merged with the Nuclear Freeze organization (dedicated to freezing all nuclear weapons testing worldwide) at a joint convention in Cleveland to form SANE/FREEZE. Its successor is known as Peace Action, the largest U.S. peace organization. Sane Nuclear Policy poster, 1960 SANE history Peace Action
November 15, 1969 Following a symbolic three-day “March Against Death,” the second national “moratorium” against the Vietnam War opened with massive and peaceful demonstrations in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Organized by the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (“New Mobe”), an estimated 500,000 demonstrators participated as part of the largest such gathering to date. It began with a march down Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House (while Pres. Nixon watched the Purdue-Ohio State football game on TV) to the Washington Monument, where a mass rally with speeches was held.
Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Peter, Paul and Mary, and four different touring casts of the musical “Hair” entertained the demonstrators. The rally concluded with nearly 40 hours of continuous reading of known U.S. deaths (to that date) in the Vietnam War.
November 15, 1986 A government tribunal in Nicaragua convicted American Eugene Hasenfus, a CIA operative, of delivering arms to Contra rebels and sentenced him to 30 years in prison. He had been arrested when his plane was shot down by Sandanista troops. He was pardoned a month after his conviction (his last name means “rabbit’s foot” in German). Hasenfus under arrest
Bloody handprint on missile.
Mary Winsor
Scottie's Playtime 